Central Ohioans will have the chance to view the painter’s work beginning on Friday, when the
Columbus Museum of Art opens “Toulouse-Lautrec and La Vie Moderne: Paris 1880–1910.”

A dozen posters by Toulouse-Lautrec form the centerpiece, but the exhibit also encompasses more
than 150 oils, watercolors and lithographs by 97 postimpressionist artists — many of them
contemporaries of Toulouse-

Lautrec.

His posters were essentially advertisements, including those enticing Parisians to the famous
Moulin Rouge cabaret.

Both then and now, Frey said, a poster “has to stop you dead in the street.”

“You have to get the point immediately. And then it has to have something intriguing about it,
so you stand there for a while thinking about it.”

For many artists of that time, such blatant commercialism represented uncharted — and
uncomfortable — territory, said Dominique Vasseur, chief curator of the Columbus Museum of Art.

“If you were a trained artist,” he said, “I think you had your aspiration on showing your work
in the (Paris) Salon and having rich people buy your paintings.”

Toulouse-Lautrec, however, was happy to apply his talents to promotion, beginning in 1891 with
Moulin Rouge: La Goulue, his first poster for the Moulin Rouge.

“This was suddenly this new window of opportunity for him to have his work seen by thousands of
people,” Vasseur said.

Other postimpressionists followed suit, said Ellen Lee, curator at the Indianapolis Museum of
Art and a specialist in the period.

“It would take as much creativity or acumen to design a really effective poster that got people’s
attention, that was witty, that showed the ability to draw or compose,” Lee said.

Although Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters are routinely exhibited today, the works of his
contemporaries are less well-known.

Phillip Dennis Cate, curator of the upcoming exhibit, said about 90 percent of the “
one-of-a-kind” works (paintings or drawings, not prints) in “La Vie Moderne” haven’t been shown in
the United States.

“The art world often likes to limit art history and create iconic heroes such as
Toulouse-Lautrec while forgetting that there were numerous important and active artists at the same
time,” Cate said.

One example is Henri Riviere, whose shadow-theater designs — cut-out figures that appeared as
silhouettes and were created for Montmarte’s Chat Noir cabaret — were unknown to Vasseur.

“These were almost a prototype of moviemaking,” Vasseur said, “because there would be a script
and backgrounds.”

What Riviere and the other lesser-known artists had in common with Toulouse-

Lautrec was an interest in, and an eye for, capturing the bohemian lifestyle of 19th-century
Paris.

The legacy of Toulouse-Lautrec — whose life had, in Frey’s words, “a lot of plot” — might have
benefited from the captivating details.

He was born in 1864 to an aristocratic family in southern France and, as a child, suffered
health problems thought to stem from a genetic disorder. He broke thigh bones, which didn’t heal
properly; and he might have suffered rickets.

Although he developed a normal-sized torso, he remained extremely short in adulthood — posing
physical challenges that limited his participation in many activities and might have led him to
art.

“He painted the people and the places he knew best — not only his family and their grand estates
but also circuses and side-show performers, bars, dance halls and brothels,” Frey said.

The aristocrat, dwarf and friend of prostitutes died in 1901 at age 36, probably of alcoholism
and perhaps syphilis.

“You can’t get much more plot than that,” Frey said.

Columbus marks the second stop in an eight-city tour for the exhibit.

“Toulouse-Lautrec and La Vie Moderne” represents a departure for the museum, Vasseur said, in
that the museum traditionally has focused on impressionism, not postimpressionism.

“We did ‘Renoir’s Women,’ ‘Degas Landscapes,’ the ‘In Monet’s Garden’ exhibitions,” he said. “
And our collection is very heavy in impressionism.”

The impressionists often created bucolic pastoral scenes, but Toulouse-Lautrec and his
contemporaries opted for lively views of Paris and its eclectic populace at work and at play.

“It’s in a sense trying to subvert what was traditional and accepted, and really get to the
heart of what Paris as a city of great change was about,” Vasseur said.

And Toulouse-Lautrec, he noted, was “the poster boy for a lot of these disenfranchised people . .
. living on the margin of respectable Parisian society.”